February 2009

February 23, 2009

BOMB IT: Through interviews and guerilla footage of graffiti writers in action on 5 continents, BOMB IT tells the story of graffiti from its origins in prehistoric cave paintings through its notorious explosion in New York City during the 70's and 80's, then follows the spread of this art around the globe. This documentary tracks down today's most innovative and pervasive street artists as they battle for control over the urban visual landscape. You'll never look at public space the same way again.

February 16, 2009

'NEXT: A Primer on Urban Painting' is a documentary exploration of graffiti-based visual art as a world culture. The filmmaker profiles the art form in nine countries including USA, Canada, France, Holland, Germany, England, Spain, Japan and Brazil. Combining verite visual moments and interviews with various participants in the subculture, the film conveys the dynamism and creative brilliance of this important emerging artistic movement.

"...Like the homeless, OTHER relies a great deal on the waste of the wealthy. Wherever he goes, whatever city he’s in, he gathers most of his art materials from picking through the garbage that lines cities streets and alleyways. As we talked, he packaged the sides of a little house, built from scrap, to prepare it to go into the ROM. (It was part of a heating process intended to kill bugs. If his work carried any aggressive insects into the ROM from the street, they could wreak havoc on the ROM’s other collections.) While he prepped the panels, he explained that he gathered the materials to build the little house from the streets of Montreal over a one-month period: “Montreal is insane. People throw out so much garbage. Like a perfectly good bicycle with a flat tire.”

“In Japan, you find the best metal. All their posters are made out of aluminum because they have so much excess metal, but they don't have any wood because they don't want to cut down the last forests. When my friend and I were in Tokyo for two weeks, we slept outside. We just slept in between houses. And everybody knows that cardboard is, like, the best insulator. If you don't want to sleep on hard cement, it's the best thing ever; it's the warmest. It actually keeps in the heat you release. In every other city in the world it seems that cardboard is completely abundant, but in Japan, the homeless will fight you for cardboard. We were at a subway station and we found some. We pulled it out and these homeless guys ran up to us, threw their fists in the air, and were ready to take us out!”

As well as having spent the occasional night on the street, OTHER has also had a short experience with true homelessness. “I lived on the street for four months in Europe.... I didn't have a home the whole time. I went with, like, one hundred dollars for four months. I slept in bushes, hitchhiked, hopped trains, stole food.”